“Embrace Your Madness”

“A very American energy” was the first reaction of Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic — the same house that released John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces — upon reading Tristan’s book. “Just kind of a wild Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac feel.”

Before long, Grove would be buying ads hawking two books, Barnyard and Dunces, under the banner FICTION WITH A SHELF LIFE. Before long, Publishers Weekly would be announcing “the sort of author discovery story of which legends are made” to the whole of New York publishing (“A Startling American Heartland Novel”), and Gadfly would be photoshopping Tristan’s mug into a field of tall corn (“The Cornbelt Kid”), and Interview magazine would be asking whether Tristan Egolf was “the next Faulkner,” featuring a long conversation with Tristan titled “Rejection Turns Gold” and a photo of the author sitting in a window frame, glaring at the reader:

“The writer wears a cotton shirt and relaxed khakis by Dockers.”


HE SHOULD HAVE been the happiest guy in the world. The book. His life’s dream. It was something concrete now, it was taking shape. The money wasn’t bad, either: 3,000 euros from Gallimard, another 15,000 or so from Picador in the U.K. And yet, while his success made him relieved, thankful and proud, it didn’t transform him. Even when he was making his final edits on the book, in fact, he was rolling cigarettes like crazy, waking up from violent nightmares and clomping out of bed to work on the book some more, pacing. “I thought he would be very happy,” says Marie, “and everything would be very lighter [sic], but it wasn’t.”

He left Marie. He began to move frantically. Between February 1997, when Gallimard accepted his manuscript, and the summer of 1999, when the American reviews of Barnyard began to peter out, Tristan jumped from place to place and woman to woman, declaring his love at full volume in public places, drunk, before abruptly panicking, fleeing. None of it stuck. He met an exotic language teacher, Sandra, with dark curly hair and ginsu cheekbones; promptly knocked her up; filled her Paris duplex with empty beer bottles; decided he wanted to be a dad, then changed his mind; abandoned Sandra, abandoned his unborn daughter; stopped returning phone messages; escaped to New York City; met a proud tall blonde, Hannah, and proposed marriage eight days after their first kiss; filled her apartment with angry stacks of paper, dirty dishes. It was a confusing period for anyone trying to keep track. “He was completely indifferent to mundane reality,” says Dominique, who remembers how Tristan grinned the day he told her about Sandra’s pregnancy. “He was quite laughing about it, as a child who has made something wrong.”

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